Some Hoosiers Spring Forward While Others Lag Behind

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) _ The start of daylight-saving time this weekend has an effect so strange in Indiana that many residents could use the extra hour to explain it to outsiders.

While most Indiana counties remain on Eastern Standard Time, residents of 16 counties move their clocks forward an hour.

Eleven of those counties are in the Central time zone, and move their clocks to be even with Chicago’s Central Daylight Time and Indianapolis’ EST.

The five other counties are in the Eastern zone and move their clocks up to Eastern Daylight Time to keep pace with nearby Louisville, Ky., and Cincinnati.

The result is that some people in the same time zone have different times on their clocks, while people in different zones have the same time. This occurs among neighbors in a state less than 150 miles wide.

Indiana residents just call the two times ″fast″ and ″slow.″

″It creates confusion for us until October,″ said Barbara Schuler, office manager at WSCH radio in Lawrenceburg. ″We make it a point to tell listeners if an event is on fast or slow time.″

She said the confusion hits hardest when family members are operating on different clocks, such as when a parent working in Cincinnati has a child in a school using standard time.

″It’s an absolute mess,″ said Donna Benning, a bookkeeper at an auto dealership in Milan. ″The kids tell me to pick them up at 3 p.m. and I always show up an hour early.″

Daylight-saving time was standardized by Congress in 1966, but in 1972, Indiana joined Hawaii and Arizona in exercising an option to exempt themselves.

However, the Legislature left some border counties near Illinois and Kentucky to go daylight-saving time.